It’s not easy being a journalist. For one thing, you’re expected to do interviews. Every time you do that you’ll find yourself battling the spoken-written word differential gap. The what?! The gap that separates the spoken and written word, and makes them fundamentally different. Many people don’t realise this, but speech rarely comes out of our mouths the way it is printed in magazines.
When speaking, we use fillers like “ehm” and “well” to verbally fill the time we need to think about what we’re going to say next. We also use stop words. These are words that we repeat often, usually without realising it. I think motorsport’s most common stop words are “obviously” and the dreaded “for sure”. Most importantly, when producing live speech we don’t always finish our sentences. We tend to cut out words or just cut off the entire sentence half-way through. Because of this, it’s common to hear something like “know what we should do, let’s eh… really wanna go get frites”. Weird as the formulation may be, your brain’ll understand the message. It’ll fill in the information holes with such ease that under normal circumstances you don’t even notice anything’s off.
Unless of course you’re a journalist who has interviewed someone, recorded the entire thing, and then sat down to type up the conversation for publication. All of a sudden every cut-off sentence, every stop word, every filler stands out. Sometimes the transcription of a perfectly coherent spoken conversation can prove to be perfectly illegible on paper. The journalist is then forced to take the verbal mess and edit it into something readable. This is a tricky process that takes years to perfect and that, even then, can cause you trouble. How often haven’t we heard a celebrity complain about a magazine publishing something they didn’t say “like that”?
I’ve always felt that converting spoken to written words is especially difficult in sports. After all, as a sports journalist you’re not only facing the differences between speech and writing, you’re also confronted with strong emotions. I’ll give you an example. I learned long ago that at a circuit drivers are the best sources of information. So when an Audi mysteriously retired from last year’s Blancpain GT feature race in Zandvoort, I decided to ask the driver what had happened. I got a pretty clear answer.
“It’s fluffy unbelievable. He eh… we just got fluffy hit at the fluffy start! From fluffy behind! Some people fluffy terrible. Don’t have fluffy brains. Really… I’m so fluffy pissed. I was in a fluffy good place. He was behind me, should have stayed there. But no. He fluffy didn’t break and fluffy smashed into me. Broke the fluffy car. They ruined the entire fluffy weekend! It’s all just fluffied up. Really really fluffy, this.”**
While hearing these words, I felt relieved I wasn’t there as a motorsports journalist. I wouldn’t have known what to do with such a high-spirited quote. I don’t think literal publication would have been an option due to lack of family-friendliness. But if not that, is it possible to normalise this type of speech? And if yes, would the written text still have any relation to the original words? How big would the risk be of publishing something that no longer has roots in reality? Is that desirable? Or admissible? Maybe the safest route would’ve been a paraphrase: “Driver X made it known he wasn’t happy.” It’s probably best if we leave this conundrum for the professionals to solve.
**He didn’t actually say ‘fluffy’. I just used ‘fluffy’ to replace another (ruder) stop word.